Irish Rebellion of 1798

The Irish Rebellion of 1798 was a failed Irish nationalist uprising against British rule which occurred from May to October 1798 amid the French Revolutionary Wars. The non-sectarian nationalist group, the United Irishmen, briefly created an independent republic before it was crushed by the British following months of open rebellion. As a result, the British crown abolished the personal union with the Kingdom of Ireland and created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

Background
The story of the previous two centuries in Ireland was one of English overlordship, often brutally enforced. Finally prevailing in the Nine Years' War, England demanded the loyalty and obedience of the old Catholic elite, who for the most part chose instead to leave their homeland in the Flight of the Earls. The Plantation of Ulster established Protestant settlers in the north.

Meanwhile, a series of Penal Laws restricted the religious freedoms of Catholics, barring them from public office. Oliver Cromwell's atrocities made clear his contempt for the Irish and their religion, driving Catholicism underground. Not surprisingly, the Catholic Irish sided with the Stuarts in the succession wars. Calm was assured in the 18th century when a Protestant Anglo-Irish "Ascendancy" felt secure in its hold over a powerless, impoverished, and overwhelmingly Catholic peasantry.

History
Ireland appeared stable as the end of the 18th century approached. But this stability was based on the rule of an essentially Anglican ascendancy; northern Presbyterians shared the Catholics' sense of disenfranchisement. This was the logic behind the formation of the Society of United Irishmen, which held its first meeting in Belfast in 1791. Its founders Samuel Neilson, Theobald Wolfe Tone, and Thomas Russell were all Protestants, as was their early leader James Napper Tandy. They were "patriots" - in the specialized sense that they were Protestants who favored Irish independence. They were also unabashedly inlfuenced by both the American and French Revolutions. Yet it was only Wolfe Tone who favored universal suffrage - Catholic included. His comrades felt the peasantry was (in William Drennan's words) "unfit for liberty" - too much influenced by its clergy to be trusted with democratic responsibilities. The issue was energetically discussed at meetings and in the United Irishmen's newspaper, the North Star. The ultra-Britishness of the Protestants in Ulster is taken for granted now, but as the example of the United Irishmen shows, this was not always so. Even at the time, however, some Protestants took a different direction. The edge of the Plantation of Ulster was a natural flashpoint for sectarian violence. The Orange Order, which was named after William of Orange, whose victories in the Succession Wars were rallying points, was established at Loughgall, County Armagh, in 1795, after the Battle of the Diamond. This sectarian brawl at the Diamond crossroads sparked off the Armagh Outrages, in which many Catholic homes were attacked. Membership of the Order was overlapped with that of the Peep o' Day Boys, who attacked in the dawn, ruthlessly driving outmany hundreds of Catholic families.

Crackdown
Meanwhile, a crackdown by the authorities in 1793 had driven the United Irishmen underground. By 1796, Wolfe Tone and Lord Edward FitzGerald were meeting French revolutionary officials in Paris. A son of the Duke of Leinster, FitzGerald, the "Citizen Lord", was ptoentially a powerful advocate for the United Irishmen's cause. In the event, his impetuosity and indiscretion made him a liability, alienating moderates in the Irish ascendancy and rattling the French. Even so, France did put together an invasion fleet that same year, only for it to be dispersed by a "Protestant Wind". Despite this, the United Irishmen had 280,000 members at the beginning of 1798. Again, the government reaction left them no peaceful recourse: the imposition of martial law in March 1798 precipitated a rising. This time, however, the French dragged their heels and sent only a small force.

In Ireland, a new group of rebels, known as the Croppies, were ready for the fight. The Croppies took their name and style from the French Jacobins, who had close-cropped hair to show their contempt to the aristocratic powdered wig. Across the country, though, support for a fight was patchy. Brutal campaigns by General Gerard Lake in Ulster and around Dublin weakened the United Irishmen in what should have been their heartlands. Further south, the Catholic peasants were far more exercised by their poverty - and by the Penal Laws.

Vinegar Hill
On 24 May 1798, Kildare was taken in a surprise attack by the British. It all turned very dirty as a string of tit-for-tat massacres ensued. The high-minded non-sectarianism of the United Irishment went by the board, especially in the south. The murderous feeling was mutual as British armies converged on County Wexford. A force that was 20,000 strong defeated the inadequately armed rebels at Vinegar Hill on 21 June. Up to 1,000 people, including women and children, were killed in the aftermath.

Towards union
The French sent a disappointingly small force under General Jean Joseph Amable Humbert, which arrived on the coast of County Mayo in August 1798. With their help, the local rebels established a Republic of Connaught - which lasted all of 13 days. In October, Wolfe Tone tried to land in Donegal with a larger French force, but he did not even make it to th shore before being captured by the British. Up to a point, the justice of the rebels' cause was implicitly acknowledged in the 1800 Act of Union, which came into effect in January 1801. William Pitt the Younger viewed Ireland's exclusion from full union as an anomaly and the direct cause of much disaffection among Ireland's ruling class. In his eagerness to enlist support, he strove to further the cause of Catholic emancipation. This upset King George III, who took seriously his role as patron and protector of the Church of England. The prime minister was forced to resign in 1801, and Catholic emancipation progressed slowly, finally arriving only in 1829.

Aftermath
The harsh suppression of the rebels guaranteed that Ireland's 18th century would end just as its 16th and 17th centuries had: in a burning sense of grievance against the English. Violent unrest continued to be part of IRish life in the decades that followed, but for the most part, on a small and local scale. The Famine of the 1840s did nothing to reduce Irish resentments, though sheer want and exhaustion produced passive stoicism, rather than violent eruption. A deep, continuing undercurrent of anger ensured that, despite the best efforts of O'Connell and Parnell, a wholly peaceful campaign for Home Rule would be difficult to sustain.

If the Fenians,formed by the Irish diaspora in America in the 1850s - looked ot ancient Ireland and the warriors of Finn MacCool's Fianna for their name, they looked to the Croppies of 1798 for political inspiration. They were a model for Irish republicans down to the troubled years of the 20th century.